This invention relates to visible spectrum (including ultra-violet and infrared) modulator arrays.
The parent application describes two kinds of structures whose impedance, the reciprocal of admittance, can be actively modified so that they can modulate light. One scheme is a deformable cavity whose optical properties can be altered by electrostatic deformation of one of the cavity walls. The composition and thickness of these walls, which consist of layers of dielectric, semiconductor, or metallic films, allows for a variety of modulator designs exhibiting different optical responses to applied voltages.
One such design includes a filter described as a hybrid filter which has a narrow bandpass filter and an induced absorber. When the wall associated with the hybrid filter is brought into contact with a reflector, incident light of a certain range is absorbed. This occurs because the induced absorber matches the impedance of the reflector to that of the incident medium for the range of frequencies passed by the narrow-band filter.